Psychotropic Medications And Principles

Running head: PSYCHOTROPIC MEDICATIONS AND PRINCIPLES OF NURSING 1
Mental Health Nursing and Psychotropic Drugs
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PSYCHOTROPIC MEDICATIONS AND PRINCIPLES OF NURSING 2
Introduction
Psychotropic drugs are known medications that are used to treat mental illnesses.
Psychotropic medication can be described as those drugs that affect behavior, thought,
perception, and the mood in an individual. There has been a concern about psychotropic
medication in general and antipsychotics that they are overused to people with mental illness,
especially those living with intellectual disability, mood disorders, and post-traumatic stress
disorders. Psychotropic drugs exist in a broad category and treat a variety of conditions. These
drugs work by adjusting the level of our brain chemicals. Some of the medication can cause
severe side effects, and they require special monitoring by the healthcare givers. These
medications include those that are commonly abused and those that are prescribed to a patient by
a health care professional (McAllister-Williams et al., 2017).
The legal psychotropic is classified into antidepressants, mood stabilizers, stimulants,
anti-anxiety agents, and antipsychotics. Some of the conditions that psychotropic for treatment
includes; depression, sleep disorders, anxiety, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder. These
medications are essential in our daily lives because mental health issues and wellbeing are the
concern of everyone in society either directly or indirectly. Therefore, there have been several
debates and arguments from the researches regarding the use of psychotropic drugs for treating
people who live with mental illnesses. This essay is going to discuss the controversies that have
been raised by different researchers concerning the use of psychotropic drugs. The paper will
also discuss the challenges that are faced by healthcare practitioners, especially registered nurses
who take care of the patient with mental illnesses who show unethical behaviors as a result of the
disease (Alvares, Quintana, Hickie & Guastella, 2016).
Controversies over the Use of Psychotropic Drugs

PSYCHOTROPIC MEDICATIONS AND PRINCIPLES OF NURSING 3
Some of the severe mental illnesses (SMI) may facilitate earlier deaths (10-15 years
earlier) as compared to the general healthy population in Australia. Mental health nurses have an
important responsibility in improving the psychological and physical health of these people. A
cross-section survey was conducted among the developing countries to investigate attitudes,
clinical practice, perceived training, and confidence necessary to promote physical health in
people with mental disorders. This survey involved around seventy percent of registered nurses.
All nurses showed positive towards the promotion of the physical health of people with mental
illness. The registered nurses showed an attitude in encouraging education on sexual health
issues to the patients. The respondent reported that mental illness acted as a barrier to many in
promoting physical health. Other nurses suggested a need for education on smoking cessation
and cardiovascular health (Robson, Haddad, Gray & Gournay, 2013).
Another approach in Australia in Southern Adelaide Local Health Network showed that the
Maastricht model working with the Auditory-Verbal Hallucination (AVH) could help individuals
with hearing voices as part of mental disorders. This followed after a courageous young woman
who asked for the use of the approach to treating her AVH after there was no impact after the use
of polypharmacy approach. This proved that psychotropic medication had no value to the patient
who suffers from hearing od voices as part of their mental disorders. Afterward, there was the
introduction of the new auditory therapeutic model to work with voices in the mental health
systems to enable a recovery-oriented and unpretentious trauma-informed approach for the AVH
in the healthcare system in Australia. (Fossen & Stoeckel, 2016).
Some studies argue that antipsychotics, especially those of long term use, does more
harm than the benefits it has to patient. Some researchers raised concerns that psychotropic
medication has toxic effects on the patient, and they have significant benefits to the patient

PSYCHOTROPIC MEDICATIONS AND PRINCIPLES OF NURSING 4
within a short period. As these concerns became more popular, some articles within the
mainstream media suggested that the patient suffering from mood disorders and schizophrenia
get well without using the medication (Pasina et al., 2016). Montejo, a psychiatrist, argued that
psychotropic drugs help in controlling sleep disorders. Sleeplessness is experienced by many
patients with depression and anxiety disorders, and without using psychiatric drugs, they can’t
sleep for several days. This is very harmful to their wellbeing because sleeplessness can lead to
further deterioration of their cognitive (Montejo, Montejo & Baldwin, 2018).
Inappropriate use of psychotropic medicines can lead to wastage of resources and cause
unnecessary suffering, which may cause death or other, mental related illnesses. According to
Aguglia et al., (2019), most of the patients reported that medication made them feel better, and
they were able to control their moods and behaviors than when they were not using the drugs.
In a study that aimed at investigating the patterns in usage of antidepressants, including
other prescribed psychotropic drugs among patients requiring a short-term treatment, data for the
patient who had been admitted for 12 months was obtained and analyzed. The data was collected
from various clinical files of several healthcare facilities, which provide behavioral therapies and
treatments of mentally ill persons. For a patient with more than two admissions, only the first one
was considered. These patients had presented different types of mental disorders. Some were due
to severe alcohol and substance misuse. The patients who had mental disorders due to substance
abuse were psychiatrically stable, such that not all of them required psychotropic medications for
detoxification (Gulla, Selbaek, Flo, Kjome, Kirkevold & Husebo, 2016). The others whose
condition had gotten worse, the clinicians prescribed certain psychotropic which could curb their
behaviors. The prescribed medication was recorded during admission. The fact that some
patients could get well without the use of drugs shows that the psychotropic medications are not